Top Highlights

• Our job—as employees and as managers—is to combine our individual and team efforts to make “music” like that.
• This failure is all too common in organizations. Individuals and teams may be extremely competent in their area of focus, but if they don’t collaborate well with others, the final product will suffer.
• Many employees there have a pragmatic view of people working together. They value results. They’ve seen these results happen when employees share ideas. They happen when employees adopt others’ knowledge. They happen when employees honestly and respectfully engage in robust conversations that result in better decisions.
• People working in Silicon Valley firms are aware of the potential downsides of collaboration. They know that work can sometimes take longer when more people are involved, especially when they have differences in views. They are aware that staff can temporarily lose focus on their own work when they pause to assist others. But, in weighing the benef...
• Successful collaboration calls for an open dialogue of deeply held views in a way that maintains trust and fuses divergent perspectives into great solutions.